Siddarth Jain

Siddarth Jain
Siddarth's Quick Links

  • Biography

    Siddarth's research lies at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. His doctoral thesis investigated mathematical models for probabilistic human intent recognition, shared autonomy for assistive human-robot systems, and perception algorithms involving point cloud processing with geometric methods and machine learning. Prior to joining MERL in 2019, he was affiliated with the Shirley Ryan Abilitylab, Chicago (nation's top ranked physical medicine and rehabilitation research hospital) where his research lead to developments in the assistive robotics domain, involving user studies and interactive robotic systems that integrate perception, machine learning, planning, and control to act with people in practical applications. Currently, Siddarth's research focuses on the core challenges in active perception, robotic manipulation, autonomy, and human-robot interaction.

  • Recent News & Events

    •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2024] Stefanos Nikolaidis presents talk titled Enhancing the Efficiency and Robustness of Human-Robot Interactions
      Date & Time: Friday, March 8, 2024; 1:00 PM
      Speaker: Stefanos Nikolaidis, University of Southern California
      MERL Host: Siddarth Jain
      Research Areas: Machine Learning, Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction
      Abstract
      • While robots have been successfully deployed in factory floors and warehouses, there has been limited progress in having them perform physical tasks with people at home and in the workplace. I aim to bridge the gap between their current performance in human environments and what robots are capable of doing, by making human-robot interactions efficient and robust.

        In the first part of my talk, I discuss enhancing the efficiency of human-robot interactions by enabling robot manipulators to infer the preference of a human teammate and proactively assist them in a collaborative task. I show how we can leverage similarities between different users and tasks to learn compact representations of user preferences and use these representations as priors for efficient inference.

        In the second part, I talk about enhancing the robustness of human-robot interactions by algorithmically generating diverse and realistic scenarios in simulation that reveal system failures. I propose formulating the problem of algorithmic scenario generation as a quality diversity problem and show how standard quality diversity algorithms can discover surprising and unexpected failure cases. I then discuss the development of a new class of quality diversity algorithms that significantly improve the search of the scenario space and the integration of these algorithms with generative models, which enables the generation of complex and realistic scenarios.

        Finally, I conclude the talk with applications in mining operations, collaborative manufacturing and assistive care.
    •  
    •  NEWS    MERL researchers present 3 papers on Dexterous Manipulation at RSS 23.
      Date: July 11, 2023
      Where: Daegu, Korea
      MERL Contacts: Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Arvind Raghunathan
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
      Brief
      • MERL researchers presented 3 papers at the 19th edition of Robotics:Science and Systems Conference in Daegu, Korea. RSS is the flagship conference of the RSS foundation and is run as a single track conference presenting a limited number of high-quality papers. This year the main conference had a total of 112 papers presented. MERL researchers presented 2 papers in the main conference on planning and perception for dexterous manipulation. Another paper was presented in a workshop of learning for dexterous manipulation. More details can be found here https://roboticsconference.org.
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  • Awards

    See All Awards for MERL

  • MERL Publications

    •  Sun, L., Jha, D.K., Hori, C., Jain, S., Corcodel, R., Zhu, X., Tomizuka, M., Romeres, D., "Interactive Planning Using Large Language Models for Partially Observable Robotics Tasks", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following, December 2023.
      BibTeX TR2023-148 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Sun2023dec,
      • author = {Sun, Lingfeng and Jha, Devesh K. and Hori, Chiori and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Zhu, Xinghao and Tomizuka, Masayoshi and Romeres, Diego},
      • title = {Interactive Planning Using Large Language Models for Partially Observable Robotics Tasks},
      • booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following},
      • year = 2023,
      • month = dec,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-148}
      • }
    •  Sun, L., Jha, D.K., Hori, C., Jain, S., Corcodel, R., Zhu, X., Tomizuka, M., Romeres, D., "Interactive Planning Using Large Language Models for Partially Observable Robotics Tasks", arXiv, December 2023.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Sun2023dec2,
      • author = {Sun, Lingfeng and Jha, Devesh K. and Hori, Chiori and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Zhu, Xinghao and Tomizuka, Masayoshi and Romeres, Diego},
      • title = {Interactive Planning Using Large Language Models for Partially Observable Robotics Tasks},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2023,
      • month = dec,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06876}
      • }
    •  Huang, B., Yu, J., Jain, S., "EARL: Eye-on-Hand Reinforcement Learner for Dynamic Grasping with Active Pose Estimation", 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), DOI: 10.1109/​IROS55552.2023.10341988, October 2023, pp. 2963-2970.
      BibTeX TR2023-118 PDF Video
      • @inproceedings{Huang2023oct,
      • author = {Huang, Baichuan and Yu, Jingjin and Jain, Siddarth},
      • title = {EARL: Eye-on-Hand Reinforcement Learner for Dynamic Grasping with Active Pose Estimation},
      • booktitle = {2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
      • year = 2023,
      • pages = {2963--2970},
      • month = oct,
      • publisher = {IEEE},
      • doi = {10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10341988},
      • issn = {2153-0866},
      • isbn = {978-1-6654-9190-7},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-118}
      • }
    •  Hori, C., Peng, P., Harwath, D., Liu, X., Ota, K., Jain, S., Corcodel, R., Jha, D.K., Romeres, D., Le Roux, J., "Style-transfer based Speech and Audio-visual Scene understanding for Robot Action Sequence Acquisition from Videos", Interspeech, DOI: 10.21437/​Interspeech.2023-1983, August 2023, pp. 4663-4667.
      BibTeX TR2023-104 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Hori2023aug,
      • author = {Hori, Chiori and Peng, Puyuang and Harwath, David and Liu, Xinyu and Ota, Kei and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego and Le Roux, Jonathan},
      • title = {Style-transfer based Speech and Audio-visual Scene understanding for Robot Action Sequence Acquisition from Videos},
      • booktitle = {Interspeech},
      • year = 2023,
      • pages = {4663--4667},
      • month = aug,
      • doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2023-1983},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-104}
      • }
    •  Ota, K., Jain, S., Zhang, M., Jha, D.K., "Tactile Pose Feedback for Closed-loop Manipulation Tasks", RSS 23 Workshop on Learning Dexterous Manipulation, July 2023.
      BibTeX TR2023-082 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Ota2023jul,
      • author = {Ota, Kei and Jain, Siddarth and Zhang, Mengchao and Jha, Devesh K.},
      • title = {Tactile Pose Feedback for Closed-loop Manipulation Tasks},
      • booktitle = {RSS 23 Workshop on Learning Dexterous Manipulation},
      • year = 2023,
      • month = jul,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-082}
      • }
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  • Other Publications

    •  Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Probabilistic Human Intent Recognition for Shared Autonomy in Assistive Robotics", ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 2019.
      BibTeX
      • @Article{jain2019intent,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Probabilistic Human Intent Recognition for Shared Autonomy in Assistive Robotics},
      • booktitle = {ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI)},
      • year = 2019,
      • organization = {ACM}
      • }
    •  Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Recursive Bayesian Human Intent Recognition in Shared-Control Robotics", In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2018.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{jain2018recursive,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Recursive Bayesian Human Intent Recognition in Shared-Control Robotics},
      • booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
      • year = 2018,
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Deepak Gopinath, Siddarth Jain and Brenna D Argall, "Human-in-the-loop optimization of shared autonomy in assistive robotics", IEEE robotics and automation letters, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 247-254, 2016.
      BibTeX
      • @Article{gopinath2016human,
      • author = {Gopinath, Deepak and Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna D},
      • title = {Human-in-the-loop optimization of shared autonomy in assistive robotics},
      • journal = {IEEE robotics and automation letters},
      • year = 2016,
      • volume = 2,
      • number = 1,
      • pages = {247--254},
      • publisher = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Grasp detection for assistive robotic manipulation", In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2016.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{jain2016grasp,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Grasp detection for assistive robotic manipulation},
      • booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
      • year = 2016,
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Siddarth Jain, Ali Farshchiansadegh, Alexander Broad, Farnaz Abdollahi, Ferdinando Mussa-Ivaldi and Brenna Argall, "Assistive robotic manipulation through shared autonomy and a body-machine interface", In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on rehabilitation robotics (ICORR), 2015.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{jain2015assistive,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Farshchiansadegh, Ali and Broad, Alexander and Abdollahi, Farnaz and Mussa-Ivaldi, Ferdinando and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Assistive robotic manipulation through shared autonomy and a body-machine interface},
      • booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on rehabilitation robotics (ICORR)},
      • year = 2015,
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Siddarth Jain, Katherine A Barsness and Brenna Argall, "Automated and objective assessment of surgical training: detection of procedural steps on videotaped performances", In Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), 2015.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{jain2015automated,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Barsness, Katherine A and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Automated and objective assessment of surgical training: detection of procedural steps on videotaped performances},
      • booktitle = {In Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA)},
      • year = 2015,
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Siddarth Jain and Brenna Argall, "Automated perception of safe docking locations with alignment information for assistive wheelchairs", In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2014.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{jain2014automated,
      • author = {Jain, Siddarth and Argall, Brenna},
      • title = {Automated perception of safe docking locations with alignment information for assistive wheelchairs},
      • booktitle = {In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
      • year = 2014,
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }

  • Software & Data Downloads

  • Videos

  • MERL Issued Patents

    • Title: "Simulation-in-the-loop Tuning of Robot Parameters for System Modeling and Control"
      Inventors: Jain, Siddarth; Van Baar, Jeroen; Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Sullivan, Alan; Benosman, Mouhacine
      Patent No.: 11,975,451
      Issue Date: May 7, 2024
    • Title: "Interactive Tactile Perception Method for Classification and Recognition of Object Instances"
      Inventors: Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Jain, Siddarth; van Baar, Jeroen
      Patent No.: 11,794,350
      Issue Date: Oct 24, 2023
    See All Patents for MERL